With help of @nzregs I could verify that it is not a general problem. After comparing system parameters, I found out that I was able to enter a backslash with an different keyboard layout than ‘de-de’. Therefore I opened a ticket with the CRM support which is currently under investigation. It looks like it is a bug in the default form scripts.

If you have to enter a backslash in the meantime and you are experiencing the described problem, you could either copy/paste it from anywhere or you could enter ALT + 92.

Update

This issue was confirmed as a bug. The fix will be released with Rollup 7, which is currently scheduled for March 2012.

The community has the possibility to create new Q&A sites, based on the StackExchange ‘application’ through proposals on Area 51

What makes these Q&A sites way better than normal discussion boards is the ability to use them like a big wiki.
Useful content is pushed by votes of the community and is bubbling up, crap gets filtered out. Already posted information is editable for improving the overall quality.

The SharePoint community already got it’s site. sharepoint.stackexchange.com is in public beta since a few months and at the moment it looks like it could become a regular site.

You may think: why do we need yet another site, there are the MSDN forums, or x, y and z.
I could not answer this question better than this question explains it already meta.sharepoint.stackexchange.com/q/199.

At least in my opinion, the MSDN forums evolved to an award hunting area. Many ‘experts’ throw masses of answers on questions, without adding value to it (or even know the answer). Don’t get me wrong: this is not the majority, but it annoys me very much.  There is also no real way to promote valuable contributions, while devaluating the crap.

In addition the Creative Commons license guarantees that questions and answers are free to access, free to use and re-use (with attribution), and free to share… forever. So you will automatically create a knowledge base out of your contributions.

The more I use these sites, the more I miss a site which topic is the Microsoft Dynamics product range.

If you are a Microsoft Dynamics professional, I would kindly ask you to support the current proposal for a Microsoft Dynamics Q&A site

In order to support this proposal, the first step we have to achieve is to get it into the commitment stage. Therefore we need 60 followers and votes for sample questions (you can follow the proposal via the link above). If we reach this milestone, the proposal will proceed to the commitment step.

If you are interested please help to create a new opportunity for your community. You know a colleague, who’s interested? Great, tell him about the proposal. Spread the word!

Part of my task was to send a request to a web service which expects data URL-encoded. Normally you would use following class (part of System.Web)

HttpUtility.UrlEncode("some data here");

I was surprised that this leads to a SecurityException if used in a sand-boxed plugin. The sandbox does not allow the use of this class.

Instead of rewriting the method (I hate reinventing the wheel…) I’ve searched for a replacement, and found

Uri.EscapeDataString("some data here");

which is usable in sand-boxed plugins. For my task the result was the same as with UrlEncode, however I am not sure I they are different in their results.

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webtopics/archive/2009/01/19/service-principal-name-spn-checklist-for-kerberos-authentication-with-iis-7-0.aspx
• http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/regcont/en_us/op/articles/configurespn.aspx#o45872
• http://blog.sonomapartners.com/2007/04/kerberos_and_de.html

The duration of the appointment is invalid

If you need to change the maximum value you are able to do this directly in the database (which is officially supported – quote of a support ticket below).

• There is no way to modify the limit for service duration via UI. We will read this value from a SQL table and there we can change the default setting.

  Database: [Organization]_MSCRM

  Table: OrganizationBase

  Field: MaxAppointmentDurationDays

  Default value: 10

• If you overwrite this value with the needed one (for example 20) and after that perform an IISReset, the known error message (“The duration of the appointment is invalid”) will no longer occur.

  This change is the recommended solution from Microsoft CRM Support and will be supported.

• Background: This field does come originally from CRM 3.0, where customer already provided feedback that the maximum duration of 10 days does not meet their need. The solution for CRM 3.0 was a solution implementation via registry key: Navigate to the following registry hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSCRM. Create a registry key of type DWORD and name it “SchedulingEngine.MaxAppointmentDurationDays”. Provide a reasonable digit greater than 10 representing the number of days the service activity would be kept open and insure that the value is set to Decimal and not Hexadecimal. Now you can schedule an appointment with a duration value of more than 10 days.
• For CRM 4.0 you will need a manual change of the according OrganisationBase entry. Exception: If you upgrade your CRM installation from CRM 3.0 to CRM4.0, the value will be automatically carried over

Another possibility to adjust this setting is to change the organization.maxappointmentdurationdays Property via the sdk.

Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Exchange.GenerateEncryptionKeyAction failed.

Method not found: ‘Boolean Microsoft.Crm.ApplicationConfig.IsFederalInformationProcessingCompliant()’.

The cause of this error was a pending restart which was requested by Windows Update. I have no clue if a specific update was the cause of the problem, or the system state itself.
However, after rebooting the machine, the error went away and the setup was successful.

So keep in mind, if the pre-checks warns you about a pending reboot, it is sometimes better not to ignore this hint

The server role ‘Deployment Tools’ contains a set of PowerShell cmdlets to script Deployment Manager tasks.

After you have installed the Deployment Tools role you are able to add the Dynamics CRM PowerShell-Snap-In to your PowerShell session.

To use the cmdlets you have to enter following command into a PowerShell console, which adds the PowerShell-Snap-In to your active session.

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Crm.PowerShell

After this the CRM Snap-In will be listed when you enter this command

Get-PSSnapIn

Make sure that the result contains

Name : Microsoft.Crm.PowerShell
PSVersion : 2.0
Description : A Windows PowerShell snap-in containing cmdlets that manage components of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Now, you can view the cmdlets which are defined in the Snap-In with following command

Get-Command -Module Microsoft.Crm.PowerShell

At the moment of writing this post, following cmdlets are available

Disable-CrmOrganization
Disable-CrmServer
Edit-CrmOrganization
Enable-CrmOrganization
Enable-CrmServer
Get-CrmCertificate
Get-CrmDefaultOrganization
Get-CrmDeploymentAdministrator
Get-CrmEtmSettings
Get-CrmOrganization
Get-CrmServer
Get-CrmSetting
Get-CrmThrottleSettings
Import-CrmOrganization
New-CrmDeploymentAdministrator
New-CrmOrganization
Remove-CrmCertificate
Remove-CrmDeploymentAdministrator
Remove-CrmOrganization
Remove-CrmServer
Set-CrmCertificate
Set-CrmEtmSettings
Set-CrmSetting
Set-CrmThrottleSettings
Update-CrmOrganization

This is a great enhancement for managing a crm deployment. You can speed up your administrative tasks, if you add this Snap-In to your profile. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd315342.aspx

You have to enable the optimized import process by adding the DWORD key OptimizeOrgImport with value 1 to the registry hive of Dynamics CRM (see the detailed description http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977867)

Recently, I had a problem during an import of an organization which failed with following error

Message: Exception during import of organization (Name=’‘, Id=3e58a0cc-c277-df11-b2c1-0050569473db):
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: A row with a duplicate key cannot be added to the object ‘dbo.SystemUserOrganizations’-object with unique index ‘SystemUserOrganizations_CrmUserId’

The organization which I tried to import was a backup of an organization which was created in the same deployment. The import runs successful on every other deployment. With help of the Microsoft Support, we identified the cause of the issue: the OptimizeOrgImport key.

The knowledgebase article for OptimizeOrgImport contains following passage:

When you use the registry entry OptimizeOrgImport and have the value of this entry set to 1, you cannot import the same organization database more than one time.
If you want to import the same organization database more than one time, you must do one of the following things:

• Set OptimizeOrgImport = 0 and use the normal import process.
• Delete the organization, and then import the organization again.

This passage is a little bit misleading, as the optimized import process fails already at the first time, if the organization was created in the same deployment. In order to import a backup of an organization into the originating deployment, you have to deactivate OptimizeOrgImport.

However, Dynamics CRM allows you to create your own id for a record. The primary key of a record is stored in its Key-Property. On all default entities, for example account, the id property is marked as Valid for create (see accountid). This means, the sdk allows you to pass your own id.

using System;
using Microsoft.Crm.Sdk;
 
namespace PreCreateKeyPlugin
{
    public class PreCreateKeyPlugin : IPlugin
    {
        public void Execute(IPluginExecutionContext context)
        {
            if (IsPreCreate(context))
            {
                if (context.InputParameters.Contains(ParameterName.Target))
                {
                    DynamicEntity target = context.InputParameters[ParameterName.Target] as DynamicEntity;
 
                    if (target != null)
                    {
                        Guid customId = new Guid("{d7256b93-a5b5-45f9-9f2d-a1838279c35c}");
 
                        target["accountid"] = new Key(customId);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
 
        private bool IsPreCreate(IPluginExecutionContext context)
        {
            return  context.MessageName == MessageName.Create && 
                    context.Stage == MessageProcessingStage.BeforeMainOperationOutsideTransaction;
        }
    }
}

If you register this plugin for pre-create on the account entity and create a new account, it will have the provided id.

Please keep in mind, that you are in the responsibility to assign an new GUID for every execution of this plugin, but this should be clear when working with primary keys.

function GetFieldLabel(fieldname)
{
  var field = crmForm.all[fieldname+ '_c'];
 
  if (field != null){
    return field.firstChild.firstChild.nodeValue;
  }
  else {
    return '';
  }
}
 
alert(GetFieldLabel('subject'));

The other option is, to retrieve the label for the user language from the crm service. I will cover this in another article.